Cell Lysis Based on an Oscillating Microbubble Array.

Liangyu Zhang,Lin Qi,Na Pang,Long Meng,Xiaowei Huang,Jinyuan Li,Lisheng Xu,Xiufang Liu,Wei Zhou,Lili Niu,Umar Farooq

doi:10.3390/mi11030288

Abstract

Cell lysis is a process of breaking cell membranes to release intracellular substances such as DNA, RNA, protein, or organelles from a cell. The detection of DNA, RNA, or protein from the lysed cells is of importance for cancer diagnostics and drug screening. In this study, we develop a microbubble array that enables the realization of multiple cell lysis induced by the shear stress resulting from the individual oscillating microbubbles. The oscillating microbubbles in the channel have similar vibration amplitudes, and the intracellular substances can be released from the individual cells efficiently. Moreover, the efficiency of cell lysis increases with increments of input voltage and sonication time. By means of DNA agarose-gel electrophoresis, a sufficient extraction amount of DNA released from the lysed cells can be detected, and there is no significant difference in lysis efficiency when compared to cell lysis achieved using commercial kits. With the advantages of the simple manufacturing process, low cost, high efficiency, and high speed, this device can serve as an efficient and versatile tool for the single-cell sequencing of cell biology research, disease diagnosis, and stem cell therapy.

Highlights

With the popularization of separation and purification of cell contents in disease diagnosis, gene therapy, tissue engineering, and other related experiments, cell lysis has attracted increasing attention in recent years [1,2,3]
We developed a cell lysis device based on a stable cavitation microbubble array
An oscillating microbubble array applied shear stress of 5.1 kPa to the targeted cell on the bubble surface, whose cell membrane was prone to lyse

Summary

Introduction

With the popularization of separation and purification of cell contents in disease diagnosis, gene therapy, tissue engineering, and other related experiments, cell lysis has attracted increasing attention in recent years [1,2,3]. Developing an efficient cell lysis strategy is crucial for separating and purifying intracellular components [3,4,5]. Current methods of cell lysis can be categorized based on biology [6,7] and chemical [8,9,10] or physical methods [11,12,13]. The biological and chemical methods can prevent mechanical damage to the intracellular components, which are widely used to extract sensitive cell contents from most kinds of cells [14,15]

Methods

Results

Conclusion